As networking and digital media technologies advance, network-enabled consumer electronic devices have been introduced that can store, manage, and/or playback different types of digital media content. For example, all of a user's digital music, video and photos may be stored on a network storage device, and a digital media player used to render all the content on the HDTV in a user's living room.
Universal Plug-n-Play (UPnP) is a communication protocol that is commonly used between components in a home network. However, the use of UPnP originally was designed to be restricted to the home network, meaning that to enable a user to access home network content from the Internet, different and proprietary software, products and services that, unfortunately, are not universally applicable have been introduced.